7.16.24 - Why build a website like this
Because it is 2024 and we spend hours a day online and we own nothing. We live on the property of others. And having your own property is basically free.
The current state of the internet is as if land was free but we all decided to live in some rich guy's manor. Maybe it makes sense that we all spend our days and share our thoughts there, because of network effects and all that. But to not own anything at all aside from that? No where to hang your hat? It seems absurd.
Yeah it makes sense to use twitter, instagram, substack, and all of that, it makes perfect sense. But since it's free to have your own little spot, why not? It actually astounds me that more people don't do it. I can put anything I want here, I can put photos here. I can make this look however I want. It's cool.
Will see if I do anything useful with it. Public notebook is what I'm thinking, paired with a twitter profile for connectivity with the world.
In my ideal vision for the internet, we don't all rent little spaces on "platforms." At least, that shouldn't be your primary online identity. Right now, for people my age, your instagram page is sort of your online home page, where people can see that you're legit and all of that. Is there a better way?
Older people, especially academic and software people, have a memory of early blogging sites and still have online profiles and personal website built in that tradition. Young people do not know of any such tradition.
What if everyone hosted their own website, maybe following some popular templates, and social media was just some app that built feeds from the websites themselves? I'm thinking of an experience where you go online and just see RSS feeds from everyone's personal sites. Maybe the UI of this site looks like twitter or instagram, with a scroll wall and user names, but the content comes from autonomous domains.
I don't think this sort of idea would take off, because it doesn't enhance the user experience in anyway. But just on principle, it would be better. More decentralized, more ownership. The platform is an aggregator and skin, but your stuff is yours.
It occurs to me that no one cares about this at all. That people are very content being renters and being dependent on centralized platforms for everything. Finance, education, entertainment, public debate, everything. In some cases leasing a car is a better financial decision to own it. There are efficiencies, economies of scale, great network effects to doing things this way. I wonder what would need to happen for the internet to decentralize.
Deconcentration of capital and land in history has always followed a calamity or revolution. Fall of the Roman Empire. Communist government. I don't see the equivalent for the web, maybe because I lack imagination. India seems to have a creative solution with its UPI system and India stack. I guess that suggests that there are policy solutions when it comes to payments and e-commerce. But what about publishers of content?
I can imagine the government creating a digital public square, where they give every U.S. citizen some domain name, just like they have a social security number, and you are entitled to some fixed server hosting space, from a nationalized Oracle or something like that. It comes pre-loaded with a template website. You can use this how you wish, or sell the space, build whatever you want to on it. Since it's hosted on a publicly owned, nationalized server farm it is subject to first amendment protections, unlike your speech on twitter. There's some website, we can call it "social.gov", that creates an RSS feed from these sites, you could have a national twitter.
There are plenty of complications with privacy, web architecture, and how this website would present content (algorithmically? Decided by a public corporation?). Best case scenario its governance looks like the Fed, worst case it's run by a very politicized agency. But I feel that it wouldn't be expensive to build and run. There are probably articles where people discuss ideas on how to build a public social media. Will have more thoughts on this in the future.